While 2012 was nothing short of a technology miracle, 2013 promises to be even better. A few months back we posted an article on the extraordinary job Cisco did at the Olympics this summer as the official network provider. In fact, more than 4.8 billion people watched the event, with digital viewers outnumbering traditional television viewers for the first time in history, clearly showing how technology dependent we have all become. Undoubtedly, the impressive technology trend will continue in 2013.

Brocade Networks released last week their technology predictions for 2013 and Software Defined Networking (SDN) was at the top of their list. Brocade stated, “…as service providers try to meet that demand and juggle the complexities of running a profitable business -- for instance, to reduce CapEx (capital expenditure) and OpEx (operating expenditure) and increase service responsiveness -- they are looking for technology alternatives that will streamline service creation and foster innovative applications and services.” SDN provides a way for this to happen. With SDN you can connect networks and applications giving control to program both the network and orchestration layers and accommodate the end-user application needs. Without SDN the programming has to be done around the network.

IDC also predicted an increasing trend with SDN. In their annual technology prediction forecast they state, “…the SDN market is forecasted to reach $3.7 billion by 2016 and account for 35% share of Ethernet switching in the data center (up from almost negligible penetration in 2012). Major networking vendors -- including Cisco, Juniper, Brocade, and HP -- are encountering both massive risk and major new opportunities to dominate what is becoming a radically new networking landscape."

The “massive risk” they face is whether these networking giants embrace this new technology or not. Traditionally, networking devices have proprietary management systems, protocols, and lack reliable API’s for external programming. In today’s world of “we can have it the way we want it, how we want it” whether it’s customizable apps on our mobile devices or making our igoogle homepage customized to our needs, we all want the ability to choose. Within the networking world "choice" is even more paramount. Historically, the networking industry has been slow to evolve staying true to their course, but as technology continues to expand those vendors not able to coexist in multivendor environments will struggle in this more demanding, and competitive, landscape.

As technologies like SDN become more wildly accepted and multi-vendor environments become the standard it is going to be important to find a provider that can maintain and support your data center. Third-party maintainers like XSi provide excellent solutions for this type of environment. XSi offers a multi-vender, cross-platform maintenance program that can be customized to your organizations specific needs. There’s no need to hop from one vendor support line to another’s trying to figure who will take ownership of the problem your experiencing and get your system back up and running. XSi provides all the support you need under one roof with one support line. To find out more about how XSi can provide maintenance and support for all your networking equipment visit our Networking Maintenance page.